Before You Buy or Build

Not the way an Indonesian can. Full freehold title, Hak Milik, is reserved for Indonesian citizens. Three legal routes are open to you: a right of use (Hak Pakai), tied to a valid stay permit; a long-term lease (Hak Sewa), set out in a contract; and a right to build (HGB) held through your own Indonesian company, a PT PMA, the usual route if you intend to let the villa.

What you must never do is put the property in an Indonesian person's name and rely on a side agreement, even if that person is your partner or your lawyer. Nominee arrangements are unenforceable under Indonesian agrarian law, and the courts have voided them more than once. The house then belongs to whoever is named on the certificate. Which of the three routes suits you depends on whether you plan to live there or let it out, and that is one of the first things we settle. How we protect you covers the legal side in detail.

A lease gives you the land and the villa for a fixed number of years, usually 25 or 30. At the end, all of it reverts to the owner, including a house you paid to build.

So the number of years matters far less than what the contract says about extending it. Three questions decide everything. Is the extension a right, or a statement of intent? Is the price of the extension fixed now, or negotiated later? And can the lease be inherited and sold on, if you ever want to leave?

A contract that does not answer all three is worthless in twenty years, and today it looks exactly like a good one. Reading those clauses before you sign is the work. How we protect you is where that happens.

The purchase price is roughly two thirds of what you spend in the first year. Add notary and land-registry fees, acquisition tax, the legal check before you buy, setting up and running a company if your structure needs one, furnishing, and then what nobody budgets for: pool and garden care, a caretaker, maintenance in a climate that is hard on buildings, power, water, internet, insurance.

Honest headline figures don't exist, because Canggu and Tabanan differ by multiples. What we do instead is cost out the specific property before you pursue it, running costs included. Then you know whether the asking price is a good price or merely a low one. We bring that detail to every villa we look at with you.

Only with the right permissions, and a great many villas advertised as „Airbnb ready" don't have them.

Three things have to line up. The zone the land sits in must permit tourist accommodation at all. The building needs a valid construction permit and certificate of occupancy, PBG and SLF. And the operation needs a licence, which for a foreigner normally means a PT PMA with the right business classification. If one of them is missing, letting the villa is not legal, however convincing the seller's income figures look.

Bali enforces this considerably more closely than it did a few years ago. If your numbers depend on rental income, this is the first thing we check, not the last. How we protect you explains the checks.

Buying is faster, and what you get is visible: you stand in the house, see the light, hear the road, smell whether it is damp. What you cannot see is the build quality behind the render and the paperwork behind the sale. That takes checking.

Building means every decision is yours, land, zoning, water access, neighbours, architect, contractor, supervision, and so is every consequence. It takes longer, usually costs less per square metre, and ends in a house you could not have bought.

The difference between a good and a bad build in Bali is almost never the design. It is whether someone is on site regularly who does not work for the builder. We do both, and in the first conversation we will tell you honestly which one fits your situation. See Curated Listings and Custom Home Creation.